workflow

UPDATE October 2014

Belkin seems to have changed the ports the Wemo’s server listens on, so I updated the workflow. Download and replace your current install (you’ll have to set the IP again).

Today I had some spare time, so I decided to hack together a simple Alfred Workflow to be able to control my Belkin WeMo Switch (Amazon US, Amazon IT) from my Mac. TL; DR: Download and enter WeMo IP in the “Script Filter” block. Type wemo to launch it. After some googling, I found this nice bash script that allowed me to send commands to the WeMo. It was then just a matter of encapsulating it into a nice Alfred wrapper, and it was relatively easy.

In order to use my workflow, just download it, install it, open it in Alfred and enter your WeMo’s IP address into the “Script Filter” block. If you also want to use keyboard hotkeys to turn on/turn off/toggle your WeMo, type in the IP in the lower “Run Script” block as well. Open up the Hotkey blocks to edit them. Now that you’re all set, type wemo to get some info about your WeMo. Press enter on the status row to toggle it. Or you can also type wemo on or wemo off to quickly control your switch. The workflow currently supports only one device. I’d love to add support for multiple ones, but I only own one WeMo so it’d be very hard for me to develop the workflow without being able to test it. The Amazon links above are both affiliate links, if you buy a WeMo through one of them you don’t pay any extra and I get a few cents from Amazon.

Some useful Alfred 2 workflows

Today I finally bought Alfred 2, a really nice update. It’s great, but I had to recreate some scripts I got used to while using version 1. You can find them below.

CopyPath

CopyPath copies the path of the currently selected Finder Item to the clipboard. Just launch Alfred and type “path”. Also, thanks to Joachim’s suggestion, you can now set a keyboard shortcut to trigger the workflow without needing to ever launch Alfred.

Copy IP

Copy IP your current local IP, either Wi-Fi or Ethernet. It includes 3 commands:

ethip copies your Ethernet IP
wifiip copies your Wi-Fi IP
ip [interface] copies interfaces IP. It’s meant for power users. Note: on Macs usually en0 is the Ethernet interface, while en1 is Wi-Fi.

RevMove

RevMove checks your clipboard contents and removes any line containing “.rev”. It is useful if you download from file-hosting sites, such as Netload, because uploaders often include .rev files to their upload to be able to extract your files also some parts were corrupted/not available. But when everything works as it should, these files are pointless and waste time and bandwidth to be download.

MAS Search

MAS Search lets you search for an app in the Mac App Store. Just type mas followed by your search terms.

If these are not enough, you can find many, many more in the Alfred 2 Workflow list, which also features my very own CopyPath.